Save the Tiger (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Oct 03, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
John L. AvildsenRelease Date(s)
1973 (August 26, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Save the Tiger (1973) is remembered today chiefly as the movie that won Jack Lemmon an Academy Award as Best Actor. However, the film was not a commercial success and reviews were decidedly mixed. Lemmon saw Steve Shagen’s script, which had been kicking around Hollywood for years, as an opportunity to flex his acting muscles, and so badly wanted to make it he agreed to work for scale (then $165/week) so that more money could be funneled back into its production, which cost $1 million, about the price of a television movie-of-the-week.
It didn’t make much of an impression on me the only previous time I watched it, on cable television in the early ‘80s. But I was in my early twenties then, and now I’m nearly 60, and its struggling, middle-aged protagonist resonates more now than it did back then. It’s still not a great film, but better than its reputation, and its early ‘70s angst is rather interesting compared with today. The particulars have changed quite a bit, but its core anxieties are pretty much the same as ever.
Los Angeles garment manufacturer Harry Stoner (Lemmon) lives beyond his means, in a house overlooking Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills with his wife (Patricia Smith). The movie opens with him waking from a sweat-inducing nightmare, of his combat experiences during World War II. His Chinatown-adjacent company, Capri Casuals, which he owns with partner Phil Greene (Jack Gilford), is in serious financial trouble. Despite a big fashion show that day for out-of-town buyers, the bank will only finance 50% of their sales. Threats of an audit might expose Harry’s “ballet with the books.”
There seem to be but two options: financing from the mob, represented by gangster Sid Fivush (Ned Glass), or torch Capri Casuals’ Long Beach warehouse and collect the insurance money. Phil reluctantly favors the mob money option, but Harry is determined to go the arson route, contacting specialist Charlie Robbins (Thayer David).
Meanwhile, Harry is stressed to the breaking point by myriad other problems. A demanding buyer (Norman Burton, Felix Leiter in Diamonds Are Forever) pressures them to provide him with a lady friend or two, but has a life-threatening arterial occlusion while being serviced; the anchor of their factory, elderly Meyer (William Hansen, of 1776), threatens to quit over conflicts with flamboyant designer Rico (Harvey Jason, the “Mad Hungarian” from The Gumball Rally). At the podium to welcome the buyers, Harry hallucinates his dead comrades from the battlefield, seated in their place. (This is unusually effective, eerie in a way that Akira Kurosawa’s “The Tunnel” from Dreams is not.)
The 100-minute film covers about 30 hours of Harry’s life, from early morning until about late morning the following day, and admirably ends ambiguously—the movie audience never knows whether Harry got away with having his warehouse torched. Its story is bleak and depressing, if insightful and interesting, but the kind of movie a major Hollywood studio like Paramount were loathe to make in 1973, and which no major studio would touch with a ten-foot pole today.
Jack Lemmon’s performance is indulgent here and there; he has an especially long, rambling monologue at the beginning that plays like an Actors Studio exercise, while he shaves and gets dressed. Though he made Days of Wine and Roses a decade earlier, in a way Save the Tiger bridges Lemmon’s lighter roles in movies like Mister Roberts and Some Like It Hot with the greater prominence of straight dramatic parts thereafter: the TV remake of The Entertainer, The China Syndrome (his best work), Missing, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc. Oddly, immediately before this he starred in one his best films, Billy Wilder’s disarming Avanti!, in which Lemmon played virtually the same character, an executive suffering from the same sort of pressures and anxieties. Wilder himself advised the deletion of one scene in the Tiger script, a brief meeting between Harry and his mistress, a wise piece of advice that helped the film.
The domino-like cascade of problems Harry faces are realistic because many are of his own making, like not having enough cash to buy groceries and paying for them on your credit card instead. His partner, Phil—a very good, Oscar-nominated performance by Jack Gilford—lives comparatively modestly and isn’t overwhelmed as Harry is, though he and everyone else at the company are impacted by Harry’s problems. A not very effective side of Harry’s character is that he’s constantly reminded of his more innocent, baseball-loving childhood, rambling about various players he admired in his youth. More effective is the irony of Harry’s resolute patriotism and his belief in the American Dream, even as everything crumbles around him.
The picture makes great use of its Los Angeles locations: Harry’s drive down Sunset in Beverly Hills to the garment district in downtown L.A. He and Phil have lunch in Chinatown, and meet with arsonist Charlie Robbins in the balcony of the Mayan Theater on South Hill Street, areas that haven’t changed all that much. John L. Avildsen won the assignment to direct based on his work on Joe. He was best capturing such working-class environments, peaking a few years later with Rocky.
Kino’s Blu-ray of Save the Tiger sources a new 4K scan of the original camera negative. At a time when most American movies were visually getting more than a little ruddy/grainy/blotchy both in terms of film stock and theatrical prints, this transfer maximizes what’s there without altering its original appearance. In 1.85:1 widescreen, the image is strong even in under-lit and night-for-night scenes. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also very good, and optional English subtitles are included on this Region “A” disc.
Supplements are limited to a 4:3 trailer from a standard-def source, and two audio commentaries, an older one by director Avildsen (who died in 2017) and writer Shagan (who died in 2015), and one by film historian Dwayne Epstein.
Not great but far better than its reputation, Save the Tiger is recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV